Research

Slide 1 Ethnography

• This is a method used to try and determine qualities about a certain community.

• Probably the most effective methods are observation and interviews. This is because you are exposed to more subtle differences in these methods than in surveys.

• It is important to try and remain ‘out of your element’ when conducting an ethnography, don’t try and relate their practices to yours, but try and understand them from their point of view.

Slide 2 Case studies

• Case studies are an extensive look into a certain person or situation. This is often done in areas such as psychoanalysis, where the certain person represents an exception.

• Case studies are very thorough, the study is usually trying to find an underlying cause or reason for the individuals exception.

• Case studies collect data, interpret data, and develop hypotheses from the case.

• Case studies include quantitative and qualitative data.

Slide 3 interviews

• Interviews are one on one question and answer sessions between two people

• When you are doing an interview, it is important to remember that you want the interviewee to speak for himself, but at the same time, there is certain information you want to get out of it. This means that if the interview doesn’t think it’s a good question, you should be sensitive to that and rephrase it, but you should not just let the interviewee talk about whatever he wants.

• Interviews can be done in a number of ways: on the telephone, online, face to face, pretty much any way in which you are directly asking questions to another person.

Slide 4 Library database research

• Searching through a libraries database is easy, simply go to the Penrose site at http://library.du.edu/site/,

• Then type in what you want to search for in the ‘articles’ or books ‘and more’ section, depending on what you are looking for.

• You can also refine your search by clicking the box on the left to search for keywords, authors, book or article titles, call numbers and more.

• After you click the search button, you will be asked for your ID and password. When you have correctly provided those, you will be allowed to access information about the books or articles you searched for.

Slide 5 Internet Research

• Internet research is a tough area to talk about. On the one hand, the internet is a vats resource for anyone to find a lot of information, which includes information that is very hard to find. On the other, people can post anything they want on the internet, so it might not always be accurate.

• The first thing to know is a Boolean search. This means you can use modifiers such as AND, if you want to include two words in every article that comes up (e.g. bush AND election) you can put a minus sign if you want to search the articles that have no relation to the second word (Pluto – Disney) or you can use quotations to mark an entire phrase you want to find (“Nothing is more valuable than the day”)

• The next thing you need to know is what sites are trustworthy. It is helpful to be able to recognize when someone is biased one way or another, as you might get skewed information from their site. .gov sites are all run by the government and are (usually) credible. Anything associated with a college is usually a safe bet. Any site that looks like it is just a domain someone pays 15 dollars a year for, is probably no good, but the best way to find out all of these things is to cross reference your information. There are plenty of websites and if you get the same answers from 5 different ones, including respectable sources, you can be fairly certain its accurate.

Slide 6 Example

• I used these methods when I was researching virtual communities. I used all of these except library database research.

Slide 7 Assignment

• Think of a project that would be good to do one or more of these research methods on. Make the requirements and outline for the project. You do not actually have to do the research, just make the outlines.